2.29.16

Yes this is straight out of my email, but it was too perfect not to post.



February 29th 



by Jane Hirshfield

An extra day—

Like the painting’s fifth cow,
who looks out directly,
straight toward you,
from inside her black and white spots.

An extra day—

Accidental, surely:
the made calendar stumbling over the real
as a drunk trips over a threshold
too low to see.

An extra day—

With a second cup of black coffee.
A friendly but businesslike phone call.
A mailed-back package.
Some extra work, but not too much—
just one day’s worth, exactly.

An extra day—

Not unlike the space
between a door and its frame
when one room is lit and another is not,
and one changes into the other
as a woman exchanges a scarf.

An extra day—

Extraordinarily like any other.
And still
there is some generosity to it,
like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

And so I'm not such a lazy, cheating, blogger, here are some other works by Hirshfield. I like this poem, I think it goes well with the "Evolution" by Linda Bierds that posted the other day. (Here is a bio of Hirshfield, in case you'd like to read more about her background. Interesting fact, her class at Princeton was the first to graduate women. And she taught at Cal; go bears.)

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

2.28.16

Weekend Words. In real time!! This never happens.

2-25-16

Behold, the modern Sisyphus.

Long ago he traded his stone

for two, smaller and easier to carry.

But why stop there?

Shouldn’t the weight be equally distributed?

So now he carries his fortune

of pebbles in sacks around his neck

and makeshift pockets.

The future, ladies and gentlemen.

We have wonderful devices to

make our lives easier--

see his fashionable goat-skin?

See how he can carry the gravel so easily,

and throw it by the handful--

with both hands, even!

His burden can be yours,

just bring your shekels,

your wicked avarice,

and you too can have a life of ease and comfort!

2.17.16

I love it when science and art come together, and not just in a symbolic way. Understanding and connecting physical processes with the processes of the mind and heart can be really evocative. This poem asks literal questions, and they have following sentences that are not questions, but also not answers, which is akin to a process of research or Socratic discussion.



Evolution

Linda Bierds




How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled,
jellied, symmetrical cell
become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk,
the sun’s last shafts doubling the fence posts,
all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just
after Schrodinger’s What is Life,
not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before
supper. How does a chemical soup,
he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how
does a pattern shift, an outer ear
gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird’s stubby beak
sharpen toward the trout?
He was halfway between the War’s last enigmas
and the cyanide apple—two bites—
that would kill him. Halfway along the taut wires
that hummed between crime
and pardon, indecency and privacy. How do solutions,
chemical, personal, stable, unstable,
harden into shapes? And how do shapes break?
What slips a micro-fissure
across a lightless cell, until time and matter
double their easy bickering? God?
Chance? A chemical shudder? He was happy and not,
tired and not, humming a bit
with the fence wires. How does a germ split to a self?
And what is a—We are not our acts
and remembrances, Schrodinger wrote. Should something—
God, chance, a chemical shudder?—
sever us from all we have been, still it would not kill us.
It was just before dusk, his segment
of earth slowly ticking toward night. Like time, he thought,
we are almost erased by rotation,
as the dark, symmetrical planet lifts its asymmetrical cargo
up to the sunset: horses, ryegrass—
In no case, then, is there a loss of personal existence to deplore—
marten, whitethroat, blackbird,
lark—nor will there ever be.



Linda teaches at the University of Washington. In reading her background information I came across this quote from the Seattle PI: "In grade-school classrooms, there’s this notion that a poem is similar to a mathematical problem and that it has a solution. That’s very off-putting to people. They remember back to fifth or sixth grade and how they didn’t ‘get’ poetry then and probably never will. But they did get it, just in a different way. Much of the reputation that ‘poetry is difficult’ comes from this mistaken thinking that a poem has one answer." I love this!

2.15.16

Weekend words for you from the long weekend. 

2-10-16

In front of me is a table of water.

I am unsure if it is earthy

because I am afraid to break the glass.

There are people who inhabit the layers,

gilled breathing of silt and minerals,

and slowing being made into geodes,

but I can’t get to them.

And there are people above,

stretched by the height of the sky, spindly and

feathery, moving with a slow grace

and knowing eye.

These two are not opposites

and I do not have to choose between the two.

I try to speak, but my open mouth

abandons me.